NAS performance tuning – Getting the Best Out of your Storage

Are you getting the most out of your storage? Performance tuning can have huge benefits and help you improve your storage infrastructure.

Tuning your NAS storage for optimal performance requires some knowledge of how they work. This includes understanding the network, CPU, and RAM requirements and knowing what RAID level you should use. We thought we’d give you a few hints and tips to get the most out of your NAS. These tips can help you optimize performance in general and help you better understand how to manage your NAS properly.

Don’t overlook network transfer speeds.

If you have a huge data center with extensive workloads, you need a robust, reliable, and fast network. The quicker the transfer speeds, the more time your staff has to get on with other tasks instead of waiting for large files to download.

To get the best performance out of your enterprise NAS storage, installing high-speed gigabit network cards is best. You can reach multiple gigabit network cards for your NAS to support a faster load time and better performance.

Note that the processing power of modern enterprise NAS storage CPU far exceeds the capabilities of LAN file transfers. If you have multiple network cards, you will be ensuring that you are utilizing most of your CPU power. That is why it is excellent to have two-gigabit network cards per device if supported.

Hardware-level encryption for more security

One of the most effective methods to secure data is encryption. Encryption is like a lock on a door or a seal on an envelope. You can’t decrypt data without getting the right key. Encryption has been around for millennia. The ancient Greeks used it to encrypt military messages during their wars with the Persians.

So how is it any good in our digital cyberspace? Encryption scrambles data and renders it unreadable by unauthorized parties. Encryption keeps your information safe as it passes over public networks. Even if the data gets in the wrong hand, it won’t be useful unless someone knows the key. If you are hosting customer data or are providing cloud services, encryption is essential.

The encryption of a NAS system depends on the chosen algorithm and key length. It makes sense to use an AES algorithm with 256 bits for extreme security. An AES encrypted device is almost impossible to decrypt without an encryption key.

Getting the right RAID configuration

An enterprise NAS storage system can be configured as RAID5, RAID6, or RAID10, depending on your requirements. If you need fast access to your data, RAID5 may be a good choice. However, if you need faster retrieval times or are looking for extra redundancy, RAID6 may be the most appropriate choice. Alternatively, if you need more space on your NAS solution, you could use RAID10, which combines speed and redundancy and is perfect for high availability systems.

Automated storage tiering for better data management

Tiered storage combines the best aspects of both forms of storage by allowing you to create a storage space with multiple levels of performance. This makes it possible to have an affordable and robust solution for all your data management needs.

This is a feature that makes sure that your most used data will be kept on high-performance drives while less used data will go to slower drives. This works in the background without you having to do anything, so you won’t have to worry about manually moving data around or unmounting volumes for maintenance. This can help you save time and effort when managing data.

Use high-performance SSDs

You don’t want your application’s response time affected by slow HDDs, as this can cause additional problems for your business. While they may be relatively expensive compared to HDDs, their speed and performance make it worth it in the long run.

Scale-out for better flexibility

Scale-out storage provides the same functions as scale-up storage but gives greater availability, reliability, and flexibility than scale-up storage systems. Scale-out storage systems have their dedicated resources, but they are shared between multiple servers.

The major benefits of scale-out storage include:

Increased IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second)
Reduced downtime and maintenance costs
Higher bandwidth

Each NAS device has its processor, memory, cache, and disk capacity, which means they are all self-sufficient. If one device goes offline, others will still serve requests. By using a scale-out system, you can also reduce your costs due to reduced downtime and maintenance costs and higher IOPS per unit cost.

We recommend checking StoneFly’s super scale-out systems that can scale up to petabytes of storage if you are interested.

Buy more memory

If you’re adding hard drives to an existing NAS, consider whether you need more memory. The better the NAS memory, the faster it will perform.

Check your firmware version.

If your firmware hasn’t been upgraded, consider upgrading it as soon as possible. Newer software versions often include bug fixes and performance enhancements such as faster file transfers. Firmware updates are usually easy to install, but follow the manufacturer’s instructions carefully.

Bottom Line

The best NAS systems on the market can deliver phenomenal performance. But they will only do so if they are configured correctly. While it may seem like simply plugging in a bunch of drives would be enough, you can’t take that for granted.

You can do some very basic things to get the most performance out of your NAS. These include ensuring that the CPU is adequately cooled and ensuring that all drives are aligned on the same sector so that they can be accessed seamlessly. Moreover, if you are using a RAID, it is vital to ensure that there is enough parity present on each drive to ensure that the data will still be available if one goes out.